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WIR RESPEKTIEREN IHRE PRIVATSPHÄRE Wir und unsere 1430 Partner speichern und/oder greifen auf Informationen wie Cookies auf einem Gerät zu und verarbeiten personenbezogene Daten wie eindeutige Kennungen und Standardinformationen, die von einem Gerät für personalisierte Werbung und Inhalte, Werbung und Inhaltsmessung, Zielgruppenforschung und Serviceentwicklung gesendet werden. Mit Ihrer Erlaubnis dürfen wir und unsere 1430 Partner über Gerätescans genaue Standortdaten und Kenndaten abfragen. Sie können auf die entsprechende Schaltfläche klicken, um der o. a. Datenverarbeitung durch uns und unsere Partner zuzustimmen. Alternativ können Sie auf detailliertere Informationen zugreifen und Ihre Einstellungen ändern, bevor Sie der Verarbeitung zustimmen oder diese ablehnen. Bitte beachten Sie, dass die Verarbeitung mancher personenbezogenen Daten ohne Ihre Einwilligung stattfinden kann, obwohl Sie das Recht haben, einer solchen Verarbeitung zu widersprechen. Ihre Einstellungen gelten lediglich für diese Website. Sie können Ihre Einstellungen jederzeit ändern oder Ihre Einwilligung widerrufen, indem Sie zu dieser Website zurückkehren und unten auf der Webseite auf die Schaltfläche "Datenschutz" klicken. Bitte beachten Sie ferner, dass diese Website/App einen oder mehrere Dienste von Google nutzt und unter Umständen Informationen, wie unter anderem in Bezug auf Ihren Besuch oder Ihr Nutzungsverhalten, speichern kann. Sie können durch Klicken im nachstehenden Abschnitt „Google-Einverständnis“ Google und seinen Drittparteien-Tags die Nutzung Ihrer Daten zu bestimmten Zwecken gestatten oder untersagen. MEHR OPTIONENZUSTIMMEN * Online Courses * Audio Books * Movies * Podcasts * K-12 * eBooks * Languages * Donate * * * * * * * HIGH-TECH ANALYSIS OF ANCIENT SCROLL REVEALS PLATO’S BURIAL SITE AND FINAL HOURS in History, Philosophy, Technology | May 3rd, 2024 FacebookThreadsMastodonRedditMessageEmailTeilen Even if you can name only one ancient Greek, you can name Plato. You can also probably say at least a little about him, if only some of the things humanity has known since antiquity. Until recently, of course, that qualification would have been redundant. But now, thanks to an ongoing high-tech push to read heretofore inaccessible ancient documents, we’re witnessing the emergence of new knowledge about that most famous of all Greek philosophers — or at least one of the most famous Greek philosophers, matched in renown only by his teacher Socrates and his student Aristotle. Up until now, we’ve only had a general idea of where Plato was interred after his death in 348 BC. But “thanks to an ancient text and specialized scanning technology,” writes Smithsonian.com’s Sonja Anderson, “researchers say they have solved the mystery of Plato’s burial place: The Greek philosopher was interred in the garden of his Athens academy, where he once tutored a young Aristotle.” This location was recorded about two millennia ago “on a papyrus scroll housed in the Roman city of Herculaneum,” which was entombed along with Pompeii by the explosion of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. Like much else in those cities, this scroll was preserved for centuries under layers of ash. It was just one of many scrolls discovered in a villa, which may have belonged to Julius Caesar’s father-in-law, back in 1750. But for long thereafter, those scrolls were more or less unreadable, having been so thoroughly charred by the explosion of Mount Vesuvius that they crumbled to dust at any attempt to unroll them. But “recent breakthroughs have allowed researchers to read the fragile texts without touching them”: witness the projects involving particle accelerators and artificial intelligence previously featured here on Open Culture. The research project that has deciphered part of this scroll, a text by the philosopher Philodemus called the History of the Academy — that is, Plato’s academy in Athens — is led by University of Pisa professor of papyrology Graziano Ranocchia. Using a “bionic eye” technique involving infrared and X‑ray scanners, he and his team have also discovered evidence that Plato didn’t much like the music played at his deathbed by a Thracian slave girl. “Despite battling a fever and being on the brink of death,” writes the Guardian’s Lorenzo Tondo, he “retained enough lucidity to critique the musician for her lack of rhythm.” Even if you know little about Plato, you’re probably not surprised to hear that he was pointing out the difference between the real and the ideal up until the very end. via Smithsonian Mag Related content: Researchers Use AI to Decode the First Word on an Ancient Scroll Burned by Vesuvius How Ancient Scrolls, Charred by the Eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD, Are Now Being Read by Particle Accelerators, 3D Modeling & Artificial Intelligence 2,000-Year-Old Manuscript of the Ten Commandments Gets Digitized: See/Download “Nash Papyrus” in High Resolution Orson Welles Narrates an Animation of Plato’s Cave Allegory Plato’s Dialogue Gorgias Gets Adapted into a Short Avant-Garde Film How 99% of Ancient Literature Was Lost Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) | RIP PAUL AUSTER: HEAR THE MASTER OF THE POSTMODERN PAGE-TURNER DISCUSS HOW HE BECAME A WRITER in Books, Literature, Writing | May 2nd, 2024 FacebookThreadsMastodonRedditMessageEmailTeilen In the Louisiana Channel interview clip from 2017 above, the late Paul Auster tells the story of how he became a writer. Its first episode had appeared more than twenty years earlier, in a New Yorker piece titled “Why Write?”: “I was eight years old. At that moment in my life, nothing was more important to me than baseball.” After the first big-league game he ever went to see, the New York Giants versus the Milwaukee Braves at the Polo Grounds, he came face-to-face with a legend-to-be named Willie Mays. “I managed to keep my legs moving in his direction and then, mustering every ounce of my courage, I forced some words out of my mouth. ‘Mr. Mays,’ I said, ‘could I please have your autograph?’ ” Mays says yes, but there was a problem: “I didn’t have a pencil, so I asked my father if I could borrow his. He didn’t have one, either. Nor did my mother. Nor, as it turned out, did any of the other grownups.” Eventually, the young Auster’s idol “turned to me and shrugged. ‘Sorry, kid,’ he said. ‘Ain’t got no pencil, can’t give no autograph.’ And then he walked out of the ballpark into the night.” From that point on, as the middle-aged Auster tells it, “it became a habit of mine never to leave the house without making sure I had a pencil in my pocket.” Even in this childhood anecdote, readers will recognize some of Auster’s signature elements: the icons of mid-century New York, the life-changing chance encounter, the state of bitter regret. But it takes more than a pencil to become a writer. “The thing about doing this, which is unlike any other job, is that you have to give maximum effort, all the time,” Auster says. “You have to give every ounce of your being to what you’re doing, and I don’t think there are many jobs that require that. You see lazy lawyers, lazy doctors, lazy judges. They can get through things. You even see lazy athletes.” But “you can’t be a writer or a painter or a musician unless you make maximum effort.” Even after producing nothing usable in one of his usual eight-hour writing shifts, “I can at least stand up and say, at the end of the day, I gave it everything I had. I tried 100 percent. And there’s something satisfying about that, just trying as hard as you can to do something.” There’s something thoroughly American about these words, as indeed there’s something thoroughly American about Auster’s twenty postmodern page-turners (to say nothing of his many volumes of nonfiction and poetry). Yet he also had one foot in France, where he lived in the early nineteen-seventies, and several of whose respected writers — Sartre, Mallarmé, Blanchot — he translated into English. He gained his first and most fervent fanbase there, becoming a beloved écrivain american of long standing. The announcement of his death on April 30th must have set off something like a national day of mourning, and an occasion to remember what he once said to France Inter: just as a writer should always carry a pencil, “chacun doit être prêt à mourir n’importe quand.” Related content: Hear Paul Auster Read the Entirety of The Red Notebook, an Early Collection of Stories Paul Auster Reads from New Novel Sunset Park Read and Hear Famous Writers (and Armchair Sportsmen) J. M. Coetzee and Paul Auster’s Correspondence Philip Roth Predicts the Death of the Novel; Paul Auster Counters Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) | ARTIST DRAWS 9 PORTRAITS ON LSD DURING 1950S RESEARCH EXPERIMENT in Art, Psychology | May 2nd, 2024 FacebookThreadsMastodonRedditMessageEmailTeilen During the 1950s, a researcher gave an artist two 50-microgram doses of LSD (each dose separated by about an hour), and then the artist was encouraged to draw pictures of the doctor who administered the drugs. Nine portraits were drawn over the space of eight hours. We still don’t know the identity of the artist. But it’s surmised that the researcher was Oscar Janiger, a University of California-Irvine psychiatrist known for his work on LSD. The web site Live Science has Andrew Sewell, a Yale Psychiatry professor (until his recent death), on record saying: “I believe the pictures are from an experiment conducted by the psychiatrist Oscar Janiger starting in 1954 and continuing for seven years, during which time he gave LSD to over 100 professional artists and measured its effects on their artistic output and creative ability. Over 250 drawings and paintings were produced.” The goal, of course, was to investigate what happens to subjects under the influence of psychedelic drugs. During the experiment, the artist explained how he felt as he worked on each sketch. You can watch how things unfolded below (or above): 20 Minutes After First Dose. Artist Claims to Feel Normal 85 Minutes After First Dose: Artist Says “I can see you clearly. I’m having a little trouble controlling this pencil.” 2 hours 30 minutes after first dose. “I feel as if my consciousness is situated in the part of my body that’s now active — my hand, my elbow… my tongue.” 2 hours 32 minutes: ‘I’m trying another drawing… The outline of my hand is going weird too. It’s not a very good drawing is it?” 2 hours 35 minutes: Patient follows quickly with another drawing. ‘I’ll do a drawing in one flourish… without stopping… one line, no break!” 2 hours 45 minutes: Agitated patient says “I am… everything is… changed… they’re calling… your face… interwoven… who is…” He changes medium to Tempera. 4 hours 25 minutes: After taking a break, the patient changes to pen and water color. “This will be the best drawing, like the first one, only better.” 5 hours 45 minutes. “I think it’s starting to wear off. This pencil is mighty hard to hold.” (He is holding a crayon). 8 hours later: The intoxication has worn off. Patient offers up a final drawing. Related Content: R. Crumb Describes How He Dropped LSD in the 60s & Instantly Discovered His Artistic Style The Polish Artist Stanisław Witkiewicz Made Portraits While On Different Psychoactive Drugs, and Noted the Drugs on Each Painting Algerian Cave Paintings Suggest Humans Did Magic Mushrooms 9,000 Years Ago by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) | A 5‑HOUR JOURNEY THROUGH NORTH KOREAN ENTERTAINMENT: PROPAGANDA FILMS, KIDS’ CARTOONS, SKETCH COMEDY & MORE in Film, History | May 1st, 2024 FacebookThreadsMastodonRedditMessageEmailTeilen Over the second half of the twentieth century, South Korea became rich, and in the first decades of the twenty-first, it’s become a global cultural superpower. The same can’t be said for North Korea: after a relatively strong start in the nineteen-fifties and sixties, its economy foundered, and in the famine-stricken mid-nineties it practically collapsed. For that and other reasons, the country has never been in a position to send forth its own BTS, Squid Game, Parasite, or “Gangnam Style.” But whatever the difficulties at home, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea has always managed to produce entertainment for consumption by its own people: movies, animation, television shows, music, and more besides. Then again, “entertainment” may be too strong a word. A few years ago, attending a North-South cultural exchange group in Seoul, where I live, I had the chance to watch a recent movie called 우리집 이야기, or The Story of Our Home. It told its simple tale of a family of orphans trying to survive on their own with surprising technical competence — at least compared to what I’d expected — albeit with what I remember as occasional jarring lapses into flat propaganda shots, stern national anthem, flapping red-starred flag and all. According to “Entertainment Made By North Korea,” the new five-and-a-half-hour analysis from Youtuber Paper Will, that sort of thing is par for the course. In order to put North Korean entertainment in its proper context, the video begins before there was a North Korea, describing the films made on the Japanese-occupied Korean peninsula between 1910 and the end of the Second World War. Though the expulsion of the defeated Japan ended colonial rule in Korea, many more hardships would visit both sides of the newly divided country. But even during their struggles to develop, the rulers of both the developing North and South Korea understood the potential of cinema to influence their peoples’ attitudes and perceptions. Watched today, these pictures reveal a great deal about the countries’ priorities. For the DPRK, those priorities included the encouragement of unstinting hard work and allegiance to the state, embodied by its founder Kim Il Sung. Later, in the seventies and eighties, came some diversification of both media and message, as serial dramas and children’s cartoons, some of them crafted with genuine skill and charm, discouraged individualistic attitudes, sympathy for foreigners, and thoughts of defection. Under Kim Il Sung’s movie-loving Kim Jong Il, North Korean films became more watchable, thanks in large part to his kidnapping and forcibly employing South Korean director Shin Sang-ok. Under his son Kim Jong Un, the country’s popular culture has flirted with the very outer reaches of cool, assembling the likes of instrument-playing girl-group Moranbong. Nevertheless, in North Korea, entertainment continues first and foremost to enforce the preferred ideology of the ruling class, something that — perish the thought — could surely never happen in the West. Related content: Read Dictator Kim Jong-il’s Writings on Cinema, Art & Opera: Courtesy of North Korea’s Free E‑Library A‑ha’s “Take On Me” Performed by North Korean Kids with Accordions How to Defeat the US with Math: An Animated North Korean Propaganda Film for Kids North Korea’s Cinema of Dreams Watch More Than 400 Classic Korean Films Free Online Thanks to the Korean Film Archive Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) | GOOGLE LAUNCHES A NEW COURSE CALLED “AI ESSENTIALS”: LEARN HOW TO USE GENERATIVE AI TOOLS TO INCREASE YOUR PRODUCTIVITY in Artificial Intelligence, Google | April 30th, 2024 FacebookThreadsMastodonRedditMessageEmailTeilen This week, Google announced the launch of Google AI Essentials, a new self-paced course designed to help people learn AI skills that can boost their productivity. Taught by Google’s AI experts, and assuming no prior knowledge of programming, the course ventures to show students how to “use AI in the real world,” with an emphasis on helping students: * Develop ideas and content. If you’re stuck at the beginning of a project, use AI tools to help you brainstorm new ideas. In the course, you’ll use a conversational AI tool to generate concepts for a product and develop a presentation to pitch the product. * Make more informed decisions. Let’s say you’re planning an event. AI tools can help you research the best location to host it based on your criteria. You can also use AI to help you come up with a tagline or slogan. * Speed up daily work tasks. Clear out that inbox faster using AI to help you summarize emails and draft responses. Google AI Essentials features five modules (the video above comes from Module 1) and takes about 9 hours to complete. The tuition is currently set at $49, and those who complete the course will earn a Google certificate that they can share with their professional network. Google AI Essentials follows up on another course recently-featured here on OC, Generative AI for Educators. Find it here. Note: Open Culture has a partnership with Coursera. If readers enroll in certain Coursera courses and programs, it helps support Open Culture. Related Content Google & Coursera Launch New Career Certificates That Prepare Students for Jobs in 2–6 Months: Business Intelligence & Advanced Data Analytics Google & MIT Offer a Free Course on Generative AI for Teachers and Educators Google & Coursera Create a Career Certificate That Prepares Students for Cybersecurity Jobs in 6 Months by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) | ANDRÉ BRETON’S SURREALIST MANIFESTO TURNS 100 THIS YEAR in Art, History | April 30th, 2024 FacebookThreadsMastodonRedditMessageEmailTeilen People don’t seem to write a lot of manifestos these days. Or if they do write manifestos, they don’t make the impact that they would have a century ago. In fact, this year marks the hundredth anniversary of the Manifeste du surréalisme, or Surrealist Manifesto, one of the most famous such documents. Or rather, it was two of the most famous such documents, each of them written by a different poet. On October 1, 1924, Yvan Goll published a manifesto in the name of the surrealist artists who looked to him as a leader (including Dada Manifesto author Tristan Tzara). Two weeks later, André Breton published a manifesto — the first of three — representing his own, distinct, group of surrealists with the very same title. Though Goll may have beaten him to the punch, we can safely say, at a distance of one hundred years, that Breton wrote the more enduring manifesto. You can read it online in the original French as well as in English translation, but before you do, consider watching this short France 24 English documentary on its importance, as well as that of the surrealist art movement that it set off. “There’s day-to-day reality, and then there’s superior reality,” says its narrator. “That’s what André Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto was aiming for: an artistic and spiritual revolution” driven by the rejection of “reason, logic, and even language, all of which its acolytes believed obscured deeper, more mystical truths.” “The realistic attitude, inspired by positivism, from Saint Thomas Aquinas to Anatole France, clearly seems to me to be hostile to any intellectual or moral advancement,” the trained doctor Breton declares in the manifesto. “I loathe it, for it is made up of mediocrity, hate, and dull conceit. It is this attitude which today gives birth to these ridiculous books, these insulting plays.” He might well have also seen it as giving rise to events like the First World War, whose grinding senselessness he witnessed working in a neurological ward and carrying stretchers off the battlefield. It was these experiences that directly or indirectly inspired a wave of avant-garde twentieth-century art, more than a few pieces of which startle us even today — which is saying something, given our daily diet of absurdities in twenty-first century life. Related content: An Introduction to Surrealism: The Big Aesthetic Ideas Presented in Three Videos Europe After the Rain: Watch the Vintage Documentary on the Two Great Art Movements, Dada & Surrealism (1978) A Brief, Visual Introduction to Surrealism: A Primer by Doctor Who Star Peter Capaldi The Forgotten Women of Surrealism: A Magical, Short Animated Film Read and Hear Tristan Tzara’s “Dada Manifesto,” the Avant-Garde Document Published 100 Years Ago (March 23, 1918) Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) | BEHOLD THE DRAWINGS OF FRANZ KAFKA (1907–1917) in Art, Literature | April 30th, 2024 FacebookThreadsMastodonRedditMessageEmailTeilen Runner 1907–1908 UK-born, Chicago-based artist Philip Hartigan has posted a brief video piece about Franz Kafka’s drawings. Kafka, of course, wrote a body of work, mostly never published during his lifetime, that captured the absurdity and the loneliness of the newly emerging modern world: In The Metamorphosis, Gregor transforms overnight into a giant cockroach; in The Trial, Josef K. is charged with an undefined crime by a maddeningly inaccessible court. In story after story, Kafka showed his protagonists getting crushed between the pincers of a faceless bureaucratic authority on the one hand and a deep sense of shame and guilt on the other. On his deathbed, the famously tortured writer implored his friend Max Brod to burn his unpublished work. Brod ignored his friend’s plea and instead published them – novels, short stories and even his diaries. In those diaries, Kafka doodled incessantly – stark, graphic drawings infused with the same angst as his writing. In fact, many of these drawings have ended up gracing the covers of Kafka’s books. “Quick, minimal movements that convey the typical despairing mood of his fiction” says Hartigan of Kafka’s art. “I am struck by how these simple gestures, these zigzags of the wrist, contain an economy of mark making that even the most experienced artist can learn something from.” In his book Conversations with Kafka, Gustav Janouch describes what happened when he came upon Kafka in mid-doodle: the writer immediately ripped the drawing into little pieces rather than have it be seen by anyone. After this happened a couple times, Kafka relented and let him see his work. Janouch was astonished. “You really didn’t need to hide them from me,” he complained. “They’re perfectly harmless sketches.” > “Kafka slowly wagged his head to and fro – ‘Oh no! They are not as harmless > as they look. These drawing are the remains of an old, deep-rooted passion. > That’s why I tried to hide them from you…. It’s not on the paper. The passion > is in me. I always wanted to be able to draw. I wanted to see, and to hold > fast to what was seen. That was my passion.” Check out some of Kafka’s drawings below. Or definitely see the recently-published edition, Franz Kafka: The Drawings. It’s the “first book to publish the entirety of Franz Kafka’s graphic output, including more than 100 newly discovered drawings.” Horse and Rider 1909–1910 Three Runners 1912–1913 The Thinker 1913 Fencing 1917 If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here. Or follow our posts on Threads, Facebook, BlueSky or Mastodon. If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks! Related Content: Franz Kafka Says the Insect in The Metamorphosis Should Never Be Drawn; and Vladimir Nabokov Draws It Anyway Vladimir Nabokov’s Delightful Butterfly Drawings The Art of William Faulkner: Drawings from 1916–1925 The Drawings of Jean-Paul Sartre Flannery O’Connor’s Satirical Cartoons: 1942–1945 Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) | HOW ÉDOUARD MANET BECAME “THE FATHER OF IMPRESSIONISM” WITH THE SCANDALOUS PANTING, LE DÉJEUNER SUR L’HERBE (1863) in Art, History | April 29th, 2024 FacebookThreadsMastodonRedditMessageEmailTeilen Édouard Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863) caused quite a stir when it made its public debut in 1863. Today, we might assume that the controversy surrounding the painting had to do with its containing a nude woman. But, in fact, it does not contain a nude woman — at least according to the analysis presented by gallerist-Youtuber James Payne in his new Great Art Explained video above. “The woman in this painting is not nude,” he explains. “She is naked.” Whereas “the nude is posed, perfect, idealized, the naked is just someone with no clothes on,” and, in this particular work, her faintly accusatory expression seems to be asking us, “What are you looking at?” Here on Open Culture, we’ve previously featured Manet’s even more scandalous Olympia, which was first exhibited in 1865. In both that painting and Déjeuner, the woman is based on the same real person: Victorine Meurent, whom Manet used more frequently than any other model. “A respected artist in her own right,” Meurent also “exhibited at the Paris Salon six times, and was inducted into the prestigious Société des Artistes Français in 1903.” That she got on that path after a working-class upbringing “shows a fortitude of mind and a strength of character that Manet needed for Déjeuner.” But whatever personality she exuded, her non-idealized nudity, or rather nakedness, couldn’t have changed art by itself. Manet gave Meurent’s exposed body an artistic context, and a maximally provocative one at that, by putting it on a large canvas “normally reserved for historical, religious, and mythological subjects” and making choices — the visible brushstrokes, the stage-like background, the obvious classical allusions in a clearly modern setting — that deliberately emphasize “the artificial construction of the painting, and painting in general.” What underscores all this, of course, is that the men sitting with her all have their highly eighteen-sixties-looking clothes on. Manet may have changed the rules, opening the door for Impressionism, but he still reminds us how much of art’s power, whatever the period or movement, comes from sheer contrast. Related Content: The Scandalous Painting That Helped Create Modern Art: An Introduction to Édouard Manet’s Olympia Édouard Manet Illustrates Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven,” in a French Edition Translated by Stephane Mallarmé (1875) A Quick Six Minute Journey Through Modern Art: How You Get from Manet’s 1862 Painting The Luncheon on the Grass to Jackson Pollock’s 1950s Drip Paintings Watch Iconic Artists at Work: Rare Videos of Picasso, Matisse, Kandinsky, Renoir, Monet, Pollock & More The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) Puts Online 90,000 Works of Modern Art Great Art Explained: Watch 15 Minute Introductions to Great Works by Warhol, Rothko, Kahlo, Picasso & More Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) | BUKOWSKI READS BUKOWSKI: WATCH A 1975 DOCUMENTARY FEATURING CHARLES BUKOWSKI AT THE HEIGHT OF HIS POWERS in Poetry | April 29th, 2024 FacebookThreadsMastodonRedditMessageEmailTeilen In 1973, Richard Davies directed Bukowski, a documentary that TV Guide described as a “cinema-verite portrait of Los Angeles poet Charles Bukowski.” The film finds Bukowski, then 53 years old, “enjoying his first major success,” and “the camera captures his reminiscences … as he walks around his Los Angeles neighborhood. Blunt language and a sly appreciation of his life form the core of the program, which includes observations by and about the women in his life.” The original film clocked in at 46 minutes. Then, two years later, PBS released a “heavily-edited 28-minute version of the film,” using alternate scenes and a rearranged structure. Renamed Bukowski Reads Bukowski, the film aired on Thursday, October 16, 1975. And, true to its name, the film features footage of Bukowski reading his poems, starting with “The Rat,” from the 1972 collection Mockingbird Wish Me Luck. You can watch Bukowski Reads Bukowski above, and find more Bukowski readings in the Relateds below. Related Content Hear 130 Minutes of Charles Bukowski’s First-Ever Recorded Readings (1968) Charles Bukowski Reads His Poem “The Secret of My Endurance Tom Waits Reads Charles Bukowski Four Charles Bukowski Poems Animated by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) | THE ORIGINS OF ANIME: WATCH EARLY JAPANESE ANIMATIONS (1917 TO 1931) in Animation | April 26th, 2024 FacebookThreadsMastodonRedditMessageEmailTeilen Japanese animation, AKA anime, might be filled with large-eyed maidens, way cool robots, and large-eyed, way cool maiden/robot hybrids, but it often shows a level of daring, complexity and creativity not typically found in American mainstream animation. And the form has spawned some clear masterpieces from Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira to Mamoru Oishii’s Ghost in the Shell to pretty much everything that Hayao Miyazaki has ever done. Anime has a far longer history than you might think; in fact, it was at the vanguard of Japan’s furious attempts to modernize in the early 20th century. The oldest surviving example of Japanese animation, Namakura Gatana (Blunt Sword), dates back to 1917, though much of the earliest animated movies were lost following a massive earthquake in Tokyo in 1923. As with much of Japan’s cultural output in the first decades of the 20th Century, animation from this time shows artists trying to incorporate traditional stories and motifs in a new modern form. Above is Oira no Yaku (Our Baseball Game) from 1931, which shows rabbits squaring off against tanukis (raccoon dogs) in a game of baseball. The short is a basic slapstick comedy elegantly told with clean, simple lines. Rabbits and tanukis are mainstays of Japanese folklore, though they are seen here playing a sport that was introduced to the country in the 1870s. Like most silent Japanese movies, this film made use of a benshi – a performer who would stand by the movie screen and narrate the movie. In the old days, audiences were drawn to the benshi, not the movie. Akira Kurosawa’s elder brother was a popular benshi who, like a number of despondent benshis, committed suicide when the popularity of sound cinema rendered his job obsolete. Then there’s this version of the Japanese folktale Kobu-tori from 1929, about a woodsman with a massive growth on his jaw who finds himself surrounded by magical creatures. When they remove the lump, he finds that not everyone is pleased. Notice how detailed and uncartoony the characters are. Another early example of early anime is Ugokie Kori no Tatehiki (1931), which roughly translates into “The Moving Picture Fight of the Fox and the Possum.” The 11-minute short by Ikuo Oishi is about a fox who disguises himself as a samurai and spends the night in an abandoned temple inhabited by a bunch of tanukis (those guys again). The movie brings all the wonderful grotesqueries of Japanese folklore to the screen, drawn in a style reminiscent of Max Fleischer and Otto Messmer. And finally, there is this curious piece of early anti-American propaganda from 1936 that features a phalanx of flying Mickey Mouses (Mickey Mice?) attacking an island filled with Felix the Cat and a host of other poorly-rendered cartoon characters. Think Toontown drawn by Henry Darger. All seems lost until they are rescued by figures from Japanese history and legend. During its slide into militarism and its invasion of Asia, Japan argued that it was freeing the continent from the grip of Western colonialism. In its queasy, weird sort of way, the short argues precisely this. Of course, many in Korea and China, which received the brunt of Japanese imperialism, would violently disagree with that version of events. Related Content: The Art of Hand-Drawn Japanese Anime: A Deep Study of How Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira Uses Light The Aesthetic of Anime: A New Video Essay Explores a Rich Tradition of Japanese Animation How Master Japanese Animator Satoshi Kon Puhed the Boundaries of Making Anime: A Video Essay “Evil Mickey Mouse” Invades Japan in a 1934 Japanese Anime Propaganda Film Watch the Oldest Japanese Anime Film, Jun’ichi Kōuchi’s The Dull Sword (1917) Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) | WHAT WOULD HAPPEN IF A NUCLEAR BOMB HIT A MAJOR CITY TODAY: A VISUALIZATION OF THE DESTRUCTION in Politics, Technology | April 26th, 2024 FacebookThreadsMastodonRedditMessageEmailTeilen One of the many memorable details in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, placed prominently in a shot of George C. Scott in the war room, is a binder with a spine labeled “WORLD TARGETS IN MEGADEATHS.” A megadeath, writes Eric Schlosser in a New Yorker piece on the movie, “was a unit of measurement used in nuclear-war planning at the time. One megadeath equals a million fatalities.” The destructive capability of nuclear weapons having only increased since 1964, we might well wonder how many megadeaths would result from a nuclear strike on a major city today. In collaboration with the Nobel Peace Prize, filmmaker Neil Halloran addresses that question in the video above, which visualizes a simulated nuclear explosion in a city of four million. “We’ll assume the bomb is detonated in the air to maximize the radius of impact, as was done in Japan in 1945. But here, we’ll use an 800-kiloton warhead, a relatively large bomb in today’s arsenals, and 100 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.” The immediate result would be a “fireball as hot as the sun” with a radius of 800 meters; all buildings within a two-kilometer radius would be destroyed, “and we’ll assume that virtually no one survives inside this area.” Already in these calculations, the death toll has reached 120,000. “From as far as away as eleven kilometers, the radiant heat from the blast would be strong enough to cause third-degree burns on exposed skin.” Though most people would be indoors and thus sheltered from that at the time of the explosion, “the very structures that offered this protection would then become a cause of injury, as debris would rip through buildings and rain down on city streets.” This would, over the weeks after the attack, ultimately cause another 500,000 casualties — another half a megadeath — with another 100,000 at longer range still to occur. These are sobering figures, to be sure, but as Halloran reminds us, the Cold War is over; unlike in Dr. Strangelove’s day, families no longer build fallout shelters, and schoolchildren no longer do nuclear-bomb drills. Nevertheless, even though nations aren’t as on edge about total annihilation as they were in the mid-twentieth-century, the technologies that potentially cause such annihilation are more advanced than ever, and indeed, “nuclear weapons remain one of the great threats to humanity.” Here in the twenty-twenties, “countries big and small face the prospect of new arms races,” a much more complicated geopolitical situation than the long standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union — and, perhaps, one beyond the reach of even Kubrickianly grim satire. Related content: Watch Chilling Footage of the Hiroshima & Nagasaki Bombings in Restored Color Why Hiroshima, Despite Being Hit with the Atomic Bomb, Isn’t a Nuclear Wasteland Today When the Wind Blows: An Animated Tale of Nuclear Apocalypse With Music by Roger Waters & David Bowie (1986) Innovative Film Visualizes the Destruction of World War II: Now Available in 7 Languages The Map of Doom: A Data-Driven Visualization of the Biggest Threats to Humanity, Ranked from Likely to Unlikely Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. 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